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The article reviews the art exhibitions in Chelsea, New York City such as "No Life Lost," featuring the works of the Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere until April 2, 2016 and the works by artist Mickalene Thomas until March 17, 2016.

If you've been living out of town for the last year -- perhaps on a different planet -- you might need some back story before heading down to see ''Common Ground,'' an exhibition of outdoor sculpture and performance by 10 international artists in City Hall Park. Almost a year ago, on the heels of sit-ins and protests in Wisconsin and Madrid and across the Arab world, a group of activists took up residence, sleeping on sidewalks outside City Hall Park to protest budget cuts made by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg that would reduce government programs and services. Bloombergville, as their settlement was called, harked back to the Hoovervilles of the early 1930s, and was upheld by local courts as a form of free speech. It also presaged Occupy Wall Street, the encampment three months later at Zuccotti Park, five blocks south of City Hall Park, a focal point of the worldwide Occupy movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kiki Smith came to prominence as an artist in the early 1990s with sculptures that accomplished the seemingly impossible: They took the oldest subject in art, the human body, and made it over in a strikingly contemporary way. In her slumped, crouching and introverted figures made of beeswax and bronze, Ms. Smith broke not only from the lineage of the heroic human figure, but also from the example of her famous father, Tony Smith, who worked in an austere, Minimalist vein. In doing so, Ms. Smith aligned herself with artists like Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse, whose deeply personal sculptures had been absorbed into the new feminist art canon. The early 1990s were also the height of the AIDS crisis in this country (one of Ms. Smith's younger twin sisters died of AIDS in the late 1980s), and various ideas about the human body, particularly in response to the new epidemic, were circulating in and around the art world. The Bulgarian-French philosopher Julia Kristeva, influenced in part by the earlier texts of the rogue surrealist Georges Bataille, wrote about the ''abject,'' a cast-off horror that one has to face (like a corpse, or an AIDS-racked body). This idea, as well as Sigmund Freud's idea of the ''uncanny,'' an eeriness attached to inanimate, anthropomorphic figures, were popular concepts, and both were linked to Ms. Smith's work. At the same time, '70s feminism, informed by film theory and other academic developments, was evolving into something that would be called post-feminism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Modern museums have their origins in the German wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities, collections of objects assembled by European aristocrats that included everything from goblets to unusual biological specimens. The Cabinet at the Frick Collection, a modest space between the gift shop and the stairwell to the bathrooms, doesn't hold the same range of marvels. In ''A Passion for Drawings,'' a show of 10 works on paper, donated by Charles Ryskamp, a former Frick director who created the Cabinet during his tenure in the late 1980s and '90s, functions almost like a wunderkammer, offering a curious window into nature, history and politics. On the biological end is a watercolor by Pierre-Joseph Redoute (1759-1840), a Flemish-born artist who published about 2,100 botanical engravings. The watercolor here, of two plum varieties, is a study for an unrealized engraving. What's also interesting about Redoute is how he navigated the vagaries of patronage during a complicated historical period: before the French Revolution he worked for Marie Antoinette; afterward for Empress Josephine, Napoleon Bonaparte's first wife and a fanatic of roses, Redoute's specialty. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When American painting became famous in the 1950s, it arrived with a certain narrative attached to it. The canvases were big and abstract, and photographs and writing from the period implied that they were made by solitary, heroic figures who approached their work with native-born American zeal, and who, despite their talent and energy, weren't particularly literate. A different story is told in ''American Vanguards: Graham, Davis, Gorky, de Kooning and Their Circle, 1927-1942'' at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase. This version of American art history features smaller canvases and figures like John Graham (1881-1961), who was born Ivan Dombrowski in Kiev, the son of minor Polish aristocrats. But the show also rebuts the notion of the United States before the '40s or '50s as an artistic backwater. As Irving Sandler, one of the curators and a longtime scholar and champion of the New York School, wrote in the catalog: ''The 1930s, the decade of the Great Depression, is often looked down upon as a barren period in American art. It was not.'' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a 1965 essay on postwar science-fiction films Susan Sontag noted a common ingredient: a ''depersonalization'' of the characters, a kind of emotionless zombie state that occurred when their minds were taken over by aliens or robots. Some of this, she wrote, reflected the basic conditions of modern life. But it also pointed toward something new in the nuclear era. Now humans had to contend not only with the fear of death but also the ''psychologically insupportable'' possibility of a ''collective incineration and extinction which could come at any time, virtually without warning.'' Art of the 1960s exhibited similar symptoms of depersonalization. Where anxiety and trauma sat on the surface of slashed, burned and dirt-crusted canvases from the 1940s and '50s, or in the emaciated forms of Giacometti's sculptures, by the late '50s the personal, existential and emotive were replaced by a new detachment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Rembrandt used drawing in the 17th century the way 21st-century artists use photography: to record people, places and things, and as source material or preparatory studies for his works. There is no consensus on how many drawings he produced, but some estimates place the number in the thousands. A selection from his prodigious output is on view in ''Drawings by Rembrandt, His Students and Circle From the Maida and George Abrams Collection,'' which features more than 50 drawings by nearly two dozen artists. Rembrandt's drawings reflect an environment that, in certain respects, wasn't so different from our own. Amsterdam in the 17th century was a wealthy and cosmopolitan trading center, and Rembrandt, unlike many of his European peers, did not travel for education or inspiration; he got what he needed right there. The art market in which he worked rose and fell along with persistent wars and speculative economies, like the tulip mania crash of 1637. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Can artists change the world? They aren't granted as many opportunities as politicians or armies. But when all else fails, the visionary thinking of artists has become public policy. Ten years ago an artist turned mayor painted dilapidated buildings with bright primary colors in Tirana, Albania, performing a kind of art therapy on a depressed city. And in Bogota, Colombia, traffic police were replaced with mimes in the hope of supplanting corruption and violence with playful street theater. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The 1980s were a complicated decade for American art. New York was back from the brink of bankruptcy, but gentrification was killing bohemianism. The art market flourished, but it also created a lopsided demand for painting and other market-friendly mediums. Art stars were born, but artists were dying of AIDS. All of this serves as a backdrop for ''Circa 1986'' at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill. The show features 65 works by 47 artists, made between 1981 and 1991, and was organized by John Newsom, Astrid Honold and Nicola Trezzi: a painter, a curator and an editor. The works are all drawn, however, from six private New York collections, including that of the founders of the art center, Marc and Livia Straus, and their children, Ari and Sarena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Portraits were not just a popular genre in the early days of this nation; they were among the only art that patrons would pay for. As a result, many American artists went abroad, hoping to test their abilities on juicier subjects, like allegorical or historical epics. But portraiture has remained an important American genre, something that can serve as a springboard to larger ideas. This is evident in some of the works in ''American Portraits: Treasures From the Parrish Art Museum'' in Southampton. Rather than proceeding chronologically, the exhibition moves through the human life cycle, a tack that feels appropriate for portraiture. The show also emphasizes the importance of a sense of place -- something that can get lost in the white-wall art space of a museum or gallery -- by featuring lots of local landscapes and East End artists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the good things about art history is that it is always being rewritten. In the case of the New York School, that self-described Greatest Generation of midcentury artists, newer histories have moved past the singular, heroic-figure narrative to emphasize the era's inherent collectivism and internationalism, and the presence of women -- and not just as wives or lovers. ''Esteban Vicente: Portrait of the Artist,'' at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, starts with one artist, but quickly -- and thankfully -- opens up into one of these broader, more inclusive chapters. Vicente (1903-2001), a Spanish-born artist who lived most of his life in New York, was best known for his collages, and a big red abstract-floral one greets visitors at the entrance. A watercolor by his contemporary Philip Pavia, ''Freefall No. 2'' from 1959, hangs nearby, however, turning the installation immediately into a dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I once asked an art dealer how he determined whether someone was an outsider artist, and he offered this criterion: anyone who called up and said he or she was an outsider artist was immediately disqualified. In his view, outsider artists don't self-identify and they don't operate telephones. Standing inside the 19th annual Outsider Art Fair at 7 West 34th Street in Manhattan on Thursday evening, Colin Rhodes, an Australian art historian who's written a book on the subject, disagreed. ''Pathology is not the defining criterion,'' he said. For him, an outsider artist is not an amateur, just someone working outside the regular art world structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The traditional, Western way of approaching a painting is to treat it like a window. Linear perspective, developed during the Renaissance, even provided a scientific method for creating a sense of space opening up inside that picture window. But what if you scrapped the idea of the window, as modern painters did? And then decided to treat painting like a photograph or book? Perhaps you can see where we're headed, from the title of ''R. H. Quaytman: Spine, Chapter 20'' at the Neuberger Museum. Ms. Quaytman stands on the cutting edge of conceptual -- or, at this point, post-post-conceptual -- painting. ''Spine, Chapter 20'' serves as a sort of midcareer retrospective, although a highly idiosyncratic and self-reflexive one. It is both a chapter in, and a summary of, her career so far. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When is a painting finished? For the old masters, it was pretty straightforward: when the varnish went on, the painting was finished. Later, things got murkier. The Impressionists were criticized because their canvases looked, to their contemporaries, like dashed-off preliminary sketches. ''Fairfield Porter: Raw/The Creative Process of an American Master'' at the Parrish Museum in Southampton provides a more recent, but similarly complicated, case. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article reviews the exhibitions "Moroni: The Riches of Renaissance Portraiture" "Betye Saar: Keepin it Clean", and "Nari Ward: We the People" being held in New York City.